Humanising Language Teaching
Year 4; Issue 2; March 02

The Heart of the Matter

"Where the spirit does not work with the hand there is no art."
- Leonardo da Vinci

Lou Spaventa, SIT, Vermont, USA

Hello to all of you who read this electronic journal. I am going to make a few presumptions about you. The first is that you are, at the least, interested in or curious about humanistic teaching. The second is that you have some experience inside a classroom and know the responsibility and the privilege of guiding a class of learners. The last presumption is that you are the kind of person who works on getting the teaching right. By that I mean that you constantly seek new techniques, new ideas, new methods and new media through which to become a better teacher. Now to me.

I have been teaching since 1969 in my own country, the United States, and in other countries, specifically the Republic of Korea, Saudi Arabia, England, the former Yugoslavia, Mexico and Colombia. I have also worked for shorter periods of time in Japan, Taiwan, Vietnam, Italy, Belgium, Germany, Guatemala, and Canada. One other piece of information is that I have been in and out of the U.S. Government as a foreign service officer. This is relevant to me because I finally left the foreign service to become again what I feel I truly am, and that is a teacher. Not a professor. Not a lecturer. Not an instructor. Not a trainer. Not a facilitator. A teacher. With all the baggage that the word carries, I embrace it completely. And in the course of my thinking electronically in this column, I hope to show you what I mean by the word teacher.

To start with, let's get to the C.P. Snow (1993) duality of science and art. Is teaching rightfully thought of as a duality? Some combination of art and science? Is it mainly art or mainly science? Or is it something different altogether? The answer for me lies in Leonardo's words: “Where the spirit does not work with the hand there is no art.” I could say the same for teaching. Where the spirit does not work with what takes place inside the classroom, there is no teaching, nor is there learning. I do not take spirit as a manifestation of any particular religious idea although I do like the Quaker term inner light. However, I see spirit as the animating principle that leaps out of our interior monologue from time to time and shows the world the essence of who we are. It is the integrity of our being, our wholeness. This wholeness is intellectual, emotional and spiritual. And there, dear reader, is where humanism comes in. It is my assertion that we human beings do best when we are true to our own uniqueness, our inner light, and when we recognize that inner light in each of our students. Whatever proportion of art or science in our teaching, however we tend to think of ourselves, we do best when we work as whole human beings, fully using ourselves in our teaching.

For many years, I was interested in methodologies. Which ones were true? Which worked? I find these questions to be just a little embarrassing now as I consider them. It was never the method that I was after. It was an awareness of who I am, and an understanding that awareness must be worked on actively (I first came upon the notion of awareness in the writings and teaching of Caleb Gattegno (1973, 1974), but at the time I learned about it, I was only interested in it as a part of Silent Way teaching methodology). Finally, in my fourth decade of teaching, I have come to a point in my internal monologue on teaching at which I ask myself questions like “How do I feel about what I am doing right now in this classroom?” “How are my students reacting to what I have said or asked them to do?” I ask them in the context of being aware of the present moment and the necessity to attend both to myself and my students. I ask this beyond methodology and precisely at the point where my private and public self meet.

In my chance to speak to you electronically, I shall, I promise, take up three common questions that are asked about teaching: What do we teach? How do we teach? Why do we teach? While perhaps addressing the what question as the eternal question of curriculum, we can recognize the others as early as the middle of the twentieth century in the work of Anthony (1963) who gave us the terms technique, method and approach. We can also look at these questions pragmatically. In the United States, parents become aware of curriculum when they work with their elementary school children and find that the math is now different from when they studied it or when their high schoolers are lacking “academic” courses which sort the college-bound from those who aren't. Or more sadly, when the thousand and first teapot tempest appears over a Huckleberry Finn in the English reading list. The how questions are often reserved for the schools of education and other institutions that train teachers, but in the State of California, they are often raised in the context of bilingual education. The why questions are philosophical ones, and are often written about by theory-oriented educators and debated in public fora by politicians. To what end do we educate? In whose service?

However, what I want to emphasize in this first journal column is that for me humanistic teaching is teaching with the whole person, and that person must be discovered by each of us on our unique journeys through life. Parker Palmer, author of The Courage to Teach (1998), and an educator whose work I greatly admire and use, tells us that “…seldom do we ask the 'who' question – who is the self that teaches? How does the quality of my selfhood form – or deform – the way I relate to my students, my subject, my colleagues, my world?” (1998:4) Palmer's concern is for “the inner landscape of teaching” (1998:5). I wish to leave you then with a question for you to answer. What is your inner teaching landscape like?

Anthony, E.M. (1963 ). .Approach, method and technique.  English Language Teaching, 17, 63-67.

Gattegno, Caleb (1973) In the Beginning There Were No Words:The Universe of Babies Educational Solutions, New York

Gattegno, Caleb (1976) The Common Sense of Teaching Foreign Languages Educational Solutions, New York

Palmer, Parker (1998) The Courage to Teach, Jossey-Bass, San Francisco.

Snow, C.P. (1993) The Two Cultures Cambridge University Press, London